Long Division
by Cruelest Sea
Summary: Grief isn't something that comes all at once. Instead it spreads over time and finally consumes. Set mid-third season.
1. Subtraction

**_Long Division_**

_"It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses."- Colette_

He doesn't know why they switched places that day.

Perhaps it was chance, one of those things that they'd never even noticed ordinarily, a step to the right instead of the left, the driver becoming the passenger. Or perhaps it was fate, some cruel twist from an unseen force, pulling them in separate directions, one to life, one to death.

In truth it didn't matter either way.

They were in the middle of a joke when the passing car swerved, broadsiding and crushing the side he always sat on.

Crushing his friend while he climbed out without a scratch.

He was told later that a farmer saw the accident and called for an ambulance and the police. And that it was them who gently tore his hands from the broken body cradled in his arms and forced him to get to his feet.

They told him his friend was killed instantly, neck broken, body crushed. Dead before he lifted him out of the car, and fell beside him onto the hard pavement, blood from his skinned knees and palms mingling with the blood of his friend, poured out like an offering to an unknown god.

He didn't cry. He made all the arrangements in a quiet, composed voice.

He was the only mourner at the grave.

At the time, he can't focus on death, on loss. His mind flutters to odd things, memories of unimportant moments, forgotten places, and most of all the thought that two that once were a team, names connected to each other, never spoken without the other, has become one.

Divided and torn down the middle, broken apart in an instant that keeps on tearing, ripping him like a paper doll. He won't ever hear "Tod and Buz" again. Now it will be only...

He can't say his name alone.

The survivor moves on. He packs the repaired car as he always has, drives to the next town.

In some ways, nothing changes. He takes the same kind of work as he always has, meets the same kinds of people, keeps on searching for that elusive something he still hasn't found.

But sometimes, when it's late and he doesn't think before speaking, he asks for a job for two, a hotel room with two beds, or an extra drink for an unfilled place at a dimly lit bar. He walks with a space beside him, stepping one way when opening a door, pausing as if waiting for another to follow. His friend's luggage stays tied on the back of the car, untouched, unopened, and he never fills the passenger seat.

He never mentions the other.

But sometimes when it's late at night, when work is finished, and he's alone, he sits in the darkness of an empty hotel room and stares, searches in the darkness with unseeing eyes.

Somewhere in the midst of his searching, of his wanderings, those silent, empty eyes start to burn. He wipes at them before he starts crying, but not before a single tear escapes and splashes to the floor.

And for an instant it lies there, a quiet, unanswered question, before seeping into the hard floor, forgotten and lifeless.

Gone.


	2. Addition

_"Sorrow you can hold, however desolating, if nobody speaks to you. If they speak, you break down." - Bede Jarrett_

We stop talking on a summer's day somewhere between Ohio and Indiana, a hot and dry stretch of highway that we travel for an hour without seeing another car.

He never talks on country roads. Speak and he doesn't answer, whether by ignoring you or simply not hearing, I don't know. He took on my problems when he let me travel with him so I think it's only fair that I respect his silence.

But that doesn't stop me from wondering what causes it.

I know I wasn't the first person to ride along with him. There's luggage on the back of the car that doesn't belong to either of us, and there's something about my seat that feels wrong, almost as if I've stepped into the place of a ghost, filled a void only to find it's not empty. There are times when he starts to say "Linc" and it begins differently, as if for a moment he's forgotten who I am and only remembers the first person who sat here. I pretend I don't notice.

I dropped a few leading hints the first weeks, opportunities for him to tell me without pressuring. He avoided them.

It must have been a friend, someone close. Someone he left behind in one of the countless towns we drift through.

After a while I decide he's dead.

Finally, on an empty country road in the middle of nowhere, I ask him, plain and outright about someone a long time ago who used to occupy my seat in his car. Tod doesn't answer me at first. He just sits, knuckles white against the steering wheel, eyes staring straight ahead at something only he can see.

"Buz Murdoch." Three syllables, spoken quietly without inflection of any kind. He says them as if he expects me to know the name, to share whatever pain he holds by an empathetic look, as if I can know, by a name, why he never untied the luggage or why he never talks on a country road. He says the name with such significance I know he expects me to have a face, an image, a _person_ wrapped inside it.

But I don't know the name and it gives me an odd feeling to realize that a man is gone, someone who meant everything to one person, and only that person. Nobody else recognizes the name, almost as if the man behind it has been erased and blown away on the wind, leaving only a whispered memory.

I don't ask and he doesn't offer anything. It's his personal memories and I have no right to intrude, I know. For all the places we go together there's always been a wall between us. I can't climb it and I wouldn't even if I could. I can only wait and see if he ever takes it down by himself.

We turn off onto a side road, deeper into the country, past a farm with the wafting scent of fresh hay and the sounds of cows lowing as they graze. There's a breeze drifting across us and I tilt my head back into the sun. Across from me Tod sits, stiff and motionless, eyes searching both sides of the road as if expecting someone to appear. After a while I join him in looking without even knowing what we're searching for.

I don't speak again until we turn onto the main highway, and then only after he switches on the radio and starts to talk over the music, joking and laughing until I join in.

And he stays that way until we turn onto another country road.


End file.
